Helping students learn how to interpret themes in text can be, without a doubt, challenging. Students benefit from knowing different aspects/textual elements within stories to look for when constructing themes. In this teaching and learning guide, we share seven concrete ways to help students anchor their theme thinking. These seven elements can…

In this article, the author presents a teaching prompt--Write-it-Out--to instruct readers who seemingly guess at words with no or limited use of grapheme-phonemic correspondences to recontextualize word-solving into writing. Through the nature of this prompt, slowing down the pace of solving words on the run with writing also reciprocally builds…

This article describes a comprehensive framework (iDISC) for the close reading of informational texts for elementary students that may need additional language, social, memory, or behavioral supports. The article introduces concrete tools that are used before, during, and after close reading, including cue-cards, language stems, discussion…

This manuscript describes the need elementary teachers have to analyze beginning and complex texts for teaching affordances and obstacles when teaching reading foundational skills and core ELA standards. A Guide to Analyze Texts for Elementary Students (GATES) is provided and described. Two teacher cases discuss how real teachers have used the…

While reading digital texts requires many of the same foundational literacy skills as reading printed texts, it also requires skills that go beyond print-based reading. In this article, we argue that the skills children need to read, understand, and communicate about digital texts is a Core Disciplinary Practice that should be addressed in the…

Changes in the U.S. demographics over the past few decades reflect the growing diversity in American classrooms as more students come to school speaking, reading, or writing two or more languages. By building on students' full repertoire of linguistic and cultural resources, educators have the potential to transform literacy instruction in…

Changes in technology and reading habits over the last decade have ushered in a new informational landscape. The Internet has become the central means by which children and adults form understandings of the world. Since readers on the Internet choose from a nearly unlimited selection of websites, they play a more active role in determining which…

This teaching tip aims to build awareness of using a text's structure as a framework for building students' reading comprehension. The authors detail the Framework for Accelerating the Strategic Comprehension of Text (FASCT) to support elementary students reading comprehension abilities by explicitly teaching students to use the structure of a…

We know that teacher support during independent reading can greatly impact the growth and development of beginning readers. However, the rapid conversion to online learning in the 2020-2021 school year required teachers to rethink and retool traditional strategies to meet the needs of their online learners. This teaching and learning guide…

Artificial intelligence is the simulation or development of reasoning and other human-like cognitive abilities by computers. Currently, there is limited exploration of applications of artificial intelligence tools for teaching reading to children in the early childhood and elementary grades, including how artificial intelligence might be used to…

Responding to recent challenges to Clay's Running Records (2019) and their analysis using a three-cueing system, the author examines this reading assessment from an additive perspective of both bottom-up and top-down orientations of reading instruction. Endorsing their inclusion among classroom reading assessments, the author navigates the tension…

Information literacy is a critical 21st-century skill, yet young readers rarely have opportunities to consider where information comes from. In this Teaching Tip, the authors use author's notes in nonfiction storybooks to promote student awareness of authorship. The author's visibility in author's notes varies along a continuum from invisible…

In this teaching tip, I describe how students in my second grade classroom and I developed a curricular structure called Monday Music that involved reading, singing, the study of grammar conventions in the English language, and critical conversations about popular music. Drawing on Dyson's conceptualization of the permeable curriculum, I offer…

Despite strong support for integrating reading and writing instruction, writing practice is often crowded out of the schedule in elementary classrooms. To promote increased emphasis on writing, a working group of literacy researchers highlights three writing goals and six research-based reading-to-writing practices to enliven instruction with more…

Text-related oral participation is ubiquitous in literacy and language instruction. As such, considering how invitations to these interactions are framed is critical, as this framing is directly implicated in the design of equitable classrooms. In this Teaching Tip, one common technique teachers have been encouraged to use--a class set of…